


Where the Great Rivers Broaden

by draculard



Category: Gilchrist - Christian Galacar
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Drowning, F/M, Ghost Sex, Graphic Description of Corpses, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Necrophilia, Pleasantly surprised that there's already a tag for that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-26 15:50:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20744741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: Nothing seems to cast a shadow underwater.





	Where the Great Rivers Broaden

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Bertolt Brecht's "The Drowned Girl."

Nothing seems to cast a shadow underwater. Peter wonders if maybe he’s just not seeing any because he isn’t looking hard enough. All his attention is focused on the immediate sensations: the coldness of the water turning his fingers and toes numb, the burning in his chest and esophagus, the unpleasant sight of oxygen bubbling out of his nose.

He sinks ten feet, then fifteen, then twenty. Sue Grady said the lake only went down ten feet by the shore. Ten feet at the deepest.

And here he is, so far down he doesn’t know which way is up, and there aren’t any shadows because there’s no light down here to make them.

He coughs and splutters, the sound muted. He draws scummy water into his lungs. He feels algae between his teeth, coating his tongue, attaching to his gums with long green fingers.

He’s drowning.

He rather likes it.

* * *

Before he knows it, he’s dry again, and he’s exactly where he wanted to be: in the grey world, the muted world that feels like the echo of a photograph of a reflection of the world above. Or the world below, or the world on the other side of the veil  — whatever it is. 

It’s so easy to acclimate himself to this world now that he’s been here before. It’s so easy to find the memory he’s looking for.

Sylvia, her auburn hair falling over a cream-colored shoulder, her eyes sparkling blue in the warm light of their bedroom. 

Sylvia in the angelic white nightie she’d worn on their wedding night, the one with spaghetti straps and lace along the hem. 

She still had her makeup on. He hadn’t given her the chance to clean it off, so they’d woken up the next morning and there had been lipstick prints beneath his stubble, and blush on the pillowcases, and he’d looked at the mascara smudges underneath Sylvia’s eyes and he’d decided a shower could wait.

It’s like he’s living it all over again. He can feel her hands against his stomach, her fingers soft and gentle — _her skin blackened by rot and smoke, her ring finger missing, a little hole blown right through her wrist_ — and she kisses him, and she tastes like lipstick, yes, but also wine and cake from the night before, and he thinks, _I could get drunk off this._

Just briefly, the taste of her lips sours, becomes a rush of dirty water down his throat. But he tightens his hands on her slim waist and the sensation disappears. He slides down her body, his cock trapped between them as he moves, dragging down her stomach and between her thighs.

He rests his hands on her hips. He buries his face in the scent of her. He tastes her for the first time. Tastes her, and —

_ — _ _ his right hand comes down on nothing. There’s nothing there for him to grasp. Her leg is gone and he’s come so close to touching the stump, the red wet exposed flesh, that for a moment he can’t breathe. For a moment, he’s drowning. And he reaches up to grab her hip, to keep the illusion going, but where her hip should be there’s just a malformed crater of muscle and eviscerated organs, and he can even see her kidney, and he can smell the fecal odor of a burst intestine, and _ _ — _

“Oh,” Sylvia gasps, back arching, thrusting upward so that Peter’s tongue dips deeper inside her, so his nose brushes her clit. “Oh, Peter, I — ”

“I know,” he says. She’s so wet, it’s like — it’s like he’s — _it’s like the water filling his throat and pushing all oxygen out of him, burning inside his nasal passage, the agony intense_ — it’s like nothing he’s ever seen before. 

He’s got two fingers inside her when her muscles clench, when she comes for the first time that night. It’s after her second orgasm that she reaches down and pulls him up and catches his lips with her own.

And she’s soft and pliant beneath him —

_ — _ _ and she’s stiff from rigor mortis and he doesn’t think he could move any of her limbs if he had all of God’s strength at his disposal _ _ — _

— and she says, “Now, Peter.”

And he knows just what she means. When he enters her, she’s so wet that there’s no resistance. No resistance at all. He slides deep inside her on the first thrust, enveloped in her, and they’re so together and the connection is so thorough that her body feels like an extension of his own, like he’s doing nothing more than taking a comfortable warm bath.

Or like he’s drowning.

“I love you,” Sylvia says. Her eyes crinkle. Her eyes are blue and bright and they sparkle like no one else’s.

_ Her eyes have melted from the blast. There’s nothing left but a thin and rubbery white substance in her eye sockets. _

“I love you, too,” Peter says.

When the memory is over, he starts it again, and this time he doesn’t feel like he’s drowning at all.


End file.
